I found this after using Debian Stable "stretch". I had a couple of old laptops, and decided to try stable for them. The stable release of Debian installs something that has turned out to be, from what I can tell, an alternate to the whole apt-get dist-upgrade, drop to init 3, and restart process.

Stable installs a plasma-discover and uses packagekit. It seems to allow you to update without the apt-get process. I installed the lot onto my aptosid install, and seems to work pretty well with the whole volatile-ness of sid.

About the only thing I have found is that to get new kernel installs active, after you let plasma-discover update, you do need to restart, but it has had a few sid issues that it HAS dealt with. Only thing it hasn't dealt with as of this writing is a serious Debian freeze. It might be something to look at.

slh

Post subject: RE: plasma-discover Posted: 18.02.2018, 18:30

Joined: 2010-08-25
Posts: 957

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That might work in Debian stable, where updates to newer major versions of qt or KDE won't happen - in unstable (where these updates happen regularly) it's an accident waiting to happen, because those tend to kill the running X session that's running the upgrade.

You can do a lot of upgrades with apt on a running KDE session, just not all of them. Knowing the distinction between safe upgrades and when to be careful is somewhere between difficult and impossible for most users, which is the (only) reason for the blank recommendation to leave X before starting an upgrade. The risk/ reward ratio just isn't favourable if you can safely upgrade 95% of the time, but will be in deep trouble 3-4 times a year when you don't notice a disruptive upgrade ahead of pulling the trigger.